The End of the World

October 1, 2008

The West's Awake by Cormac MacConnell

“CORMAC, I’ll tell you this, we are coming close to the end of the world, and the way I’m feeling now the sooner the better.

“America is in chaos, England is in chaos, the Middle East is in chaos, the Chinese are starting to poison their own babies, there are about 15 wars that we know about all over the world, and the good fellows are losing all of them. Nostradamus is being proved right every hour that passes.

“My father was working in the States during that big Depression away back in the thirties. Only he was a tough man he’d have had to come home.

“He was driving trains and there was not a day but lads were throwing themselves out on the lines in front of him, committing suicide. Other lads throwing themselves out of the skyscrapers. Didn’t I tell you before about that, and about how himself and my mother came out of it without losing a bob?

“My mother was working in service with a wealthy German crowd, they owned half of Wall Street. She’d be serving the food and the wine for the big dinners and of course, as a mere Irish maid, she was invisible to ‘em.

“But sure everybody was buying shares back then and she kept her ears open and herself and my father bought the stocks the Germans were talking about over their beef and they kept going up and up. And then there was one night when the old German at the top of the table started telling the younger ones that there could be a bad month coming up; things could start going astray.

“And my mother and father sold every stock they had the following morning on a risin’ market. And the Germans could not afford to pay her wages two months after, and my parents, God be good to them, came back to Ireland with a nice nest egg that summer and were fit to buy a farm and a pub.

“But this is worse. It’s surely the end of the world. Mark my words.

“Look at the weather. The bloody world has gone mad even in the weather. It was never as bad as this.

“There are millions of bullocks dying of thirst in Australia, there are earthquakes about every second week in China killing thousands. There is a hurricane every week tearing the guts out of what’s left of Haiti and Cuba and them countries, ripping into America.

“England is flooded constantly. Europe’s rivers are drowning all before them, we have floods all over England for the third year running and, dammit, there is even flooding in Limerick and Tipperary here at home in places that never flooded before.

“That was in the Prophecies of Colmcille. I remember that as clear as day.

“There are crooks in power in nearly every country in the world, crooks or fools or madmen. The only companies making real money are those making bullets and bombs. That’s a fact.

“America is having a big election to elect the most powerful man in the whole world, and all the people are doing is talking about a woman, this lady that shoots anything that moves above in Alaska. Tis incredible.

“But, Cormac, what convinces me altogether that we’re near the end of the world is this big scientific experiment they have started in Switzerland. Nothing good ever came out of Switzerland except clocks and sharp knives.

“Now they have built this 17 mile tunnel for five or six billion quid and they are splitting atoms and things like that at above the speed of sound to recreate the Big Bang that started life on earth!

“Oh they’ll get their Big Bang all right before the year is out, mark my words, and sure that will be the end of it.

“Mark my words.”

(He was beside me at the bar of a Galway City pub last week. I’ve put what he said in direct speech rather than reportage but he said all that and a lot more. And I think he made a lot of sense, too.)